Feb 10

The Two Red Books: Jung, Tolkien & The Imaginal Realm

Presented by Jung Society of Utah at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art

We are excited to bring Becca Tarnas to Salt Lake City for this timely talk, so well paired with the new Tolkien series!

Featured musician: To be announced!
Featured artist: Lizzie Wenger
Featured poet: To be announced!

Schedule:
6:30-7:00 pm Live Music & Mingle
7:00-8:30 pm Immersive Talk with Becca
8:30-9:00 pm Community Social

1.5 CEUs available (Additional $5 / Free for Professional Members)
Companion Depth Workshop on Saturday, February 11th

Beginning in the years leading up to the Great War, both C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien independently began to undergo profound imaginal experiences. Jung recorded these fantasies in a large red manuscript that he named Liber Novus, referred to simply as The Red Book. For Tolkien, this imaginal journey revealed to him the world of Middle-earth, whose stories and myths eventually led to the writing of The Lord of the Rings, a book he named within its own imaginal history The Red Book of Westmarch. This lecture explores the many synchronistic parallels between Jung's and Tolkien's Red Books: the style and content of their works of art, the narrative descriptions and scenes in their texts, the nature of their visions and dreams, and an underlying similarity in world view that emerged from their experiences. The two men seem to have been simultaneously treading parallel paths through the imaginal realm.

About Becca Tarnas, Ph.D.:

Becca is a scholar, artist, and editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology. She received her doctorate in Philosophy and Religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), with her dissertation titled The Back of Beyond: The Red Books of C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her research interests include depth psychology, archetypal studies, literature, philosophy, and the ecological imagination. She teaches at both Pacifica Graduate Institute and CIIS, and is the author of the book Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader's Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

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